Artificial intelligence (AI) in litigation has entered a new era. What began years ago with predictive coding and technology-assisted review (TAR) has evolved into a new generation of AI applications and capabilities. These advancements enhance collaboration, strengthen case assessment, and uncover insights to build winning case strategies faster than ever before.
Rather than replacing human judgement, today’s AI tools extend it. Empowering litigation teams to work more efficiently and effectively, focusing their expertise on what matters most. Across every stage of litigation, from early case assessment through to e-discovery and trial preparation, AI is transforming how legal professionals deliver strategy and service.
I had the opportunity to lead a recent webinar discussion featuring Josh Zylbershlag, Director of E-Discovery Services at Paul, Weiss and David Stanton, Litigation Partner at Pillsbury. During the discussion, they shared real-world examples of how they’re using AI in litigation.
6 ways leading firms are leveraging AI in litigation workflows
1. Early case assessment (ECA) and investigations
In the past, ECA often relied on manual document review, keyword searches, and intuition. Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming it into a more structured and insightful stage of litigation.
GenAI can process and summarise case documents in minutes, surface key entities and relationships, and generate timelines that give litigators an immediate sense of what the case is really about. Instead of starting with a mountain of unstructured data that can take hours or even days to review, teams can begin building a clear map quickly: who the principal players are, how they connect to key events, and when those events occurred. Early visibility enables teams to make smarter decisions about case posture, scope of discovery , and litigation strategy.
In internal investigations, where speed and confidentiality are paramount, these capabilities are powerful. Tasks that previously took days of manual effort are now drastically reduced, giving clients faster answers and legal teams more time to analyse context and intent. GenAI can rapidly extract facts, classify communications, and pinpoint patterns of behaviour or clusters of related documents. For example, a team investigating compliance risks might use AI to isolate correspondence involving specific individuals, identify recurring terms or topics, and visualise when key interactions took place in a case chronology.
Josh Zylbershlag described why using AI for these processes has been beneficial at Paul, Weiss saying, “Using GenAI on internal investigations, for early case assessment, for reviewing incoming productions, are all use cases with a much lower barrier for entry, and where the speed of GenAI can truly deliver meaningful advantages over other approaches.”
2. Document review and evidence analysis
For years, TAR and active learning models helped teams prioritise documents and improve recall rates, but they often operated as opaque systems. Attorneys could see what the algorithm produced but not why it reached its conclusions. GenAI embedded within case management, strategy and preparation workflows changes that dynamic. The best cloud-based case management solutions provide citations and highlight the specific text or data points that drive their analysis and provide a clear explanation of the logic behind them. As a result, attorneys can validate outputs more easily, refine prompts to improve accuracy, and develop defensible AI-assisted workflows that integrate human oversight at every step.
Describing how Paul, Weiss leverages the strengths of AI while avoiding overreliance, Josh explained, “We know that AI is really good at getting people beyond a blank page problem to summarise documents, to extract information. But we also know that it can’t be relied upon blindly, that providing citations and close scrutiny of the details is important.”
Today’s AI tools for litigation teams can analyse massive document sets, identify relevant materials, and detect inconsistencies with exceptional speed. Rather than simply ranking documents by probability of relevance, these tools can summarise content, cluster related materials, and cross-reference facts across multiple sources. AI can identify connections between documents, such as recurring names, events, and issues, that might have been missed in traditional reviews. AI can also distill themes emerging from thousands of pages, such as communications between key individuals and changes in language that might signal strategic shifts. Those summaries help case teams move more rapidly from raw information to actionable insight.
For instance, a litigation team might use AI to check productions from opposing counsel, flagging documents that contradict earlier statements. It might identify disclosure gaps by comparing metadata patterns or extracting entities that appear in one production set but not another. These tasks, once relegated to junior reviewers, can now be performed in minutes.
Most importantly, today’s AI tools free up attorneys to focus on what technology cannot replicate: applying judgment, interpreting context, and crafting strategy. When AI handles the repetitive, manual side of document review, human intelligence can concentrate on building arguments, understanding motivations, and shaping the story of the case.
3. Deposition preparation and transcript analysis
Traditionally, deposition preparation required hours of manual review. Litigation support professionals and associates spent time combing through production documents, drafting outlines, cross-referencing prior statements, and searching for inconsistencies or key admissions. Now, AI can handle much of that foundational work in minutes, rapidly giving attorneys a more strategic starting point.
When preparing for a deposition, generative AI can analyse a collection of documents tied to a particular witness or issue and automatically surface the most relevant portions. It can identify where that witness is mentioned, summarise the underlying facts, and generate a preliminary outline of potential questions organised by topic, issue, or theme. Litigators can spend less time searching for material and more time crafting persuasive questions and using AI analysis to anticipate responses.
After the deposition, the same technology can create concise summaries highlighting key testimony, contradictions, and areas of emotional intensity or hesitation. For example, AI can flag moments where a witness’s tone shifts or where statements appear inconsistent with earlier testimony or evidence. These capabilities turn what used to be a tedious manual annotation process into a more analytical one, quickly identifying threads worth exploring further in cross-examination or trial preparation.
Discussing the benefits of technology that unifies document review and trial preparation capabilities, David Stanton shared how Pillsbury uses Opus 2 AI for deposition-related tasks. He said, “I think [AI] is really important to bringing people into the documents, helping them more quickly understand the documents, and really start to engage strategically in what they’re doing. In preparing their cases for trial or getting ready for their depositions or analysing depositions that have already happened.”
4. Drafting and brainstorming
From motions and briefs to internal memos and client communications, creating a first draft requires deep familiarity with the facts and issues, strong writing skills, and the ability to translate complex arguments into clear prose. AI is not replacing that creative judgment, but it is changing how attorneys approach a blank page.
Generative AI tools excel at creating structured, workable first drafts that lawyers can refine. Attorneys can input a prompt, such as a set of key facts or a previous filing, and receive a starting point for a motion or a research memo in minutes, yielding a draft that gives attorneys a framework to build on.
For example, David explained that Pillsbury uses AI at the end of their workflows to convert a memo into a client email or turn a brief into PowerPoint to present to your case team. He says, “Those kinds of uses of generative AI—to repurpose written work product and brainstorm to start the process—are places where we’re seeing really effective use of the tools and a lot of time saving.”
In addition, he notes that AI has become a surprisingly effective brainstorming partner. AI can function like a sounding board, providing feedback that refines ideas and sharpens strategy. Litigators can use AI within case management software to outline potential arguments, generate alternative theories, and test their reasoning.
5. Everyday efficiency
AI also delivers value by removing friction from routine tasks. For instance, GenAI can transcribe witness interviews, hearings, and client meetings with a high degree of accuracy, creating searchable text files that can be quickly summarised or annotated. It can translate foreign-language documents or communications in seconds, allowing attorneys to get a head start, spotting relevance or nuance without waiting for outside translation services. Even simple document clean-up tasks, such as removing line breaks from a PDF, standardising fonts and headings, and generating a table of contents, are now handled in seconds rather than minutes.
These incremental efficiencies compound over time, helping lawyers and staff reclaim hours once spent on repetitive, low-value work. They shorten turnaround times, reduce administrative burdens, and improve consistency. More importantly, attorneys can build familiarity with AI by using it to handle clearly defined, easily verifiable tasks before applying the same technology to more sophisticated workflows like case assessment or transcript analysis.
6. Team and client collaboration
In a traditional workflow, significant time was lost between the identification of important evidence and its delivery to decision-makers. With AI-enabled platforms, those handoffs happen almost instantly. Review teams can tag documents or highlight relevant excerpts directly within the system, while litigation teams annotate, analyse, and build arguments from the same materials. The result is a faster, more cohesive understanding of the case.
Generative AI also extends the benefits of collaboration to clients. By summarising vast amounts of data into clear, concise narratives, lawyers can deliver timely, digestible updates often in a fraction of the time.
Josh offers this insight on how Paul, Weiss uses AI to deliver value to clients, “We’ve already used GenAI to get through tens of thousands of documents and deliver advice to clients in days instead of weeks. I think it enhances collaboration across the board, and really can accelerate some of the traditional, very long processes that took a lot of time and delayed [us] providing meaningful advice and guidance to clients.”
Clients gain earlier visibility into the facts, risks, and strategic options at play, strengthening trust and enabling faster decision-making. In high-stakes matters, where every hour counts, that responsiveness can make a measurable difference.
The future of AI in litigation
The question is no longer whether AI can accelerate casework, but how lawyers will harness that speed to allow them to think more critically and serve clients more strategically.
David framed the adoption of AI in litigation as a competitive imperative saying, “I think we’re getting to the point where clients aren’t going to tolerate you manually spending four hours drafting a set of requests for production based on a complaint when you could submit the complaint to an LLM and get that draft in a five minutes. So, it’s going to become a mandate that people familiarise themselves with it.” At the same time, he cautions that AI cannot replace the judgment, ethics, or creativity that define great lawyering. It is clear that AI will challenge the profession to evolve: to move faster, see connections sooner, and optimise decision-making. Learn more about how Pillsbury and Paul, Weiss are using AI in litigation, you can watch the full webinar on demand here. Or, to see the latest AI advancements in Opus 2’s award-winning case management, strategy, and preparation platform, request a demo now.
